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“So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.” I think the mindset of changing of something from w

“So instead of moving on, lots of frustrated employees burn out trying to change the company from within.” I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one. “Moving on” is probably easier and pragmatic but as a society it’s better to change things instead of just tossing them aside and going to the next thing. I hope the same people will also be active in politics and try to change things.

dmix 7y ago
Leaving while making it clear to your higher ups and coworkers that it's due to the dying work culture is not leaving without anything. Individual employees shouldn't have to make personal sacrifices, especially for a megacorp, beyond what they contribute each day as an employee. Unless they are an executive or management and get paid (and mandated) sufficiently to do culture stuff. There are people at Google who have this responsibility and are either failing, or possibly it's not really that bad and the news is overhyping a bunch of highly vocal individuals/small groups, while most Googlers are apolitical and happy with the group of people they work with. It's always hard to tell but most companies aren't getting multiple articles a year written about their culture.
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  > Leaving while making it clear to your higher ups and coworkers that it's due to the dying work culture is not leaving without anything. The company does not care about you. Your boss does not care about you. Managers learn to stop being emotionally invested in their employees because everyone is replaceable and everyone leaves. The company is fine with the dying work culture as long as the money keeps rolling in. Things will not get better from the efforts of employees below the Senior Vice President level. And probably not even then without that person spending all their political capital. I struggled with this at a job where I was systematically marginalized but tried to "change things from within". After I realized that nobody was going to help me and it was what was burning me out, I lawyered up and negotiated an exit. The only way to change the culture is to make having a shitty work culture expensive.
  - dmix 7y ago
    I wouldn't take it that far nor so cynically. This extreme view of business is popular in dystopian fiction and with the pure customer service level interaction with some of the worst mega corps like telecoms companies but I don't think it reflects reality of most people's office workplaces.
    - montagg 7y ago
      This person is describing their own experience; what you're saying is that you haven't had that. Which is great for you, but it's not universal. Hopefully your experience is more common. But if this person's is, then the "dystopia" isn't that fictional.
      - dmix 7y ago
        You're also making a lot of assumptions about me but I'd rather not make this anecdotal. I would have probably agreed with OP when I was 18 after watching Fight Club a hundred times that was what modern business life was like. But I've had a large variety of jobs in my life from working outdoors, brutal factory floor jobs in an auto factory and a wood flooring plant, to office-space style boring corporate HQ jobs for a big brand, to tech companies for the last decade and it's hardly the standard. Especially once you get past lower level drudgery work. I already mentioned it'd be stupid to put that level of sacrifice into a company unless you were adequately compensated or given enough power/time to accomplish actual culture change. And of course there are modern bigcos who are borderline dystopian where it's impossible or SMBs with sociopath leadership who doesn't want change. Which is when you leave if you can't tolerate the environment, assuming you can, but attempting to change it is a whole different beast.
        wayoutthere 7y ago
        I've also been a manager at a company with a shitty culture, and you simply can't stop your good employees from leaving for greener pastures. You're kind of happy for them when they do. I care about my employees and value them as human beings, but I also couldn't address their grievances or promise them any resolution to larger cultural issues. I knew they would leave, so I stopped being upset when they did and started taking the turnover as part of the job. It's not that managers don't care about their employees, they just don't care if or why you left because those circumstances are outside their control. HR collects that info in exit interviews, and a line manager has no influence with HR. If turnover starts hurting the company's bottom line, they'll do something about it. Otherwise it's not going to be a priority at the levels it needs to (how effective is your "Diversity Officer" in creating real diversity?)
- corodra 7y ago
  >Individual employees shouldn't have to make personal sacrifices, especially for a megacorp You'll never get enough credit for that line. To me, this is the biggest flaw with the computer science/programmer/IT community. They stand high and mighty against your average religious follower, of any faith. But in turn, they go to their knees and pray to the "tech gods". Both the billionaires behind them and the companies themselves. It's still religion if you think someone or something can do no wrong, in spite of what evidence shows. I remember these discussions of the potential abuse of power and economic might of today's large tech companies was in discussion in the mid 2000s. All of them were considered, tin foil hat conspiracy theorists and curmudgeons. I think "ok boomer" would have been said about them. I think Disney was the only real surprise. The rest, well, we were all warned. Hell, I only really started believing it in the early 2010s. But whatever, progress over people. We all must be civilized by technology, whether we like it or not. Those at Silicon Valley know best. We must always submit to the higher ups when it comes to our diets, lifestyles and where we live.
shizcakes 7y ago
I'm not convinced that burning out trying to change something that's unchangeable is the right strategic way to fix things for anyone other than the company. If enough people leave and go work on next-generation things because the previous-generation has run it's course - that strikes me as having many parallels in nature. Large companies don't adapt quickly unless they have a true (ie, in-practice, not just in-speech) mandate to do so. A leaf contributes to the health of the tree, but it doesn't control where new branches grow.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Googlers are trained not to think of themselves as leaves, but as roots. That's the source of the friction.
there_the_and 7y ago
The way we change things in this industry is by creating new companies and either outcompeting the incumbents or getting acquired by incumbents and taking them over. Trying to significantly change a company from the inside is a fool’s errand and these employees who keep trying are just reinforcing the incumbents’ positions.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I don’t think this works. It reminds of the discussions about improving code vs rewriting. A lot of people think that improving existing code is not worth so they rewrite it. Often only to find out that the same problems come back just in different form. Same with new companies. If we just jump to the next company we will find out that they are basically all the same run by the same principles. Where do you want to from google? Any company will run into the same pressures as soon as it reaches that size.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    * Any company will run into the same pressures as soon as it reaches that size.* Then size is the problem.
jseliger 7y ago
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organizations/dp/0674276604 https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organiza.... A classic for a reason.
- downerending 7y ago
  Voicing your concerns might make you feel better, but voting with your feet and your dollars is the only thing that matters.
BurningFrog 7y ago
> I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one. This assumes the disagreeing people are right. In reality people genuinely like different things. If a disaffected minority tries to change what a majority likes, I'd expect they'll just ruin things for everybody. Finding (or founding) a company that acts according to your ideals to work for, while letting Googlers work they way they like, is the obvious solution to me.
CharlesColeman 7y ago
> I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one. “Moving on” is probably easier and pragmatic but as a society it’s better to change things instead of just tossing them aside and going to the next thing. I hope the same people will also be active in politics and try to change things. I agree. "Moving on" is a market/capitalist attitude, while "trying to change the company from within" is a democratic/civic attitude. The US has has way too much of the former and way too little of the latter than what I'd consider healthy for a democratic nation. Civic participation is often a thankless slog where it seems like your efforts are having no effect, but it's extremely necessary. Also I think "moving on" often isn't so much "tossing aside" but simply ignoring/avoiding the problem.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I agree. You see the same mindset in politics where people fanatically stick to one party or the other but barely can formulate an own opinion on issues.
- vzcx 7y ago
  On the other hand, the United States was created by people who preferred the former. The tree root, branch, leaf, metaphor is nice. It could just be that institutions, whether economic or civic, go through a lifecycle, and that notions of 'progress' are just a cell's perception of advancements towards the next step of the cycle. Being a solid root or branch is no bad thing. But neither is being a seed. Not all seeds will sprout. Not all have too. Nature forces an economy of energy. Problems are 'solved' by mutants as they become adaptive in a certain ecology. This also implies a crowding out of the less adaptive. Go, and be a happy root. But do not despair over the happy leaves on the wind, nor the happy seedlings.
dnautics 7y ago
In a capitalist society, for small minority groups within large firms, changing from within is a strategically better. "Moving on" is only good if, as a baseline, you can line up a 'relatively equivalent' position, and if you want to enact change, there is enough momentum within the firm to do damage with 1) a mass exodus or 2) media attention. Both are made easier the higher up you are.
mensetmanusman 7y ago
This exactly describes the two major schools of thought in economics: -stay and fight to fix Vs. -vote with your feet and compete Each of these have positives and negatives :)
gukov 7y ago
Do you have similar thoughts on emigration (or brain drain) from less fortunate countries?
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Yes. In general it’s better to either stay or come back. Otherwise we are concentrating more and more into “good” countries and leave other countries behind. I understand it from an individual perspective but in the big picture I don’t think it’s a good thing. In the US it’s the same. Tech people and companies concentrate in a few centers. It’s probably better for companies and employees but not very good for the whole country.
ksec 7y ago
>I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one Yes except experience tells me unless you get your hands dirty and climb to the top of the ladder nothing will ever be changed. You may stop a company from doing things, ( Dragonfly or BlitzChung ) but their mindset wont change, their culture wont change. The attitude and culture of these companies will only change when people at the helm change, like Intel Bob Swan and AMD Lisa Su for example. And as with all things there is a long tail and slow death, Numbers on Balance Sheet and Report wont show immediate effect but over the years the trend will be undeniable. Normally by that time most of your talents are gone, you are left with people who are comfortable with current ways of things. ( Look at IBM ) Remember Companies is not a democracy, it is pretty much the other side of it more like Imperial ruling.
- xj9 7y ago
  there are democratic companies (called cooperatives) if you think workplace democracy is important, you should join one.
roenxi 7y ago
> changing of something from within is actually a good one. Politics; yes. Corporations; no. Corporations have specific legal, cultural and practical mechanisms to keep control with the shareholders and board. The major purpose of shareholders and boards is to be the people who decide whether a company changes or not. If shareholders and the board are happy taking on government work then Google will take on government work. Ditto military projects, ditto Chinese projects, ditto anything really. The workers don't have the right or privilege of influencing what compromises are made. The only influence they do have is to cause profits to go higher than people planned on; because that makes management happy.
- rexpop 7y ago
  > Politics; yes. Corporations; no. I have seen this fallacious notion expressed a thousand times over, in multiple disparate venues, and it exhausts me. I am even now questioning why I would bother to step into this conversation, and propose an alternative outlook. I do not expect you to enjoy my contesting statements. I do not expect you to thank me for them. Truly, at this point I expect negative votes, and some off-hand comments about how I am ignorant (despite the sources I can cite), or brainwashed (despite my personal experiences affirming the perspective). One thing I know is that "well actually"ing individually misguided forum comments isn't a sustainable method of educating Tech Workers like yourself–and please, don't bother denying that appellation. This is a forum for tech workers. That's what Hacker means, as it's used here. So, to the point: Politics are the mechanics of power. It's that simple. There are explicit politics in government, e.g. wherein the Constitution delineates literal powers of particular offices, and then there are the implicit politics of families, nations, firms, interpersonal relationships, administrators, etc. There is no sense in denying that the decisions we make in the systems we inhabit influence the balances of power between actors within them. When you pass me the salt at the thanksgiving table, you grant me a power to arbitrate the passing of salt. When I show up to work, I submit myself to the powerful authority of the Jira system, and the managerial strategy it comprises. These are political acts. > Corporations have specific legal, cultural and practical mechanisms to keep control with the shareholders and board. This is true. > The major purpose of shareholders and boards is to be the people who decide whether a company changes or not. > is to be This is weird. There is so much rhetorical work being done by this innocuous compound verb "is to be". In it, you imply a definitive truth. An inescapable logic. Something akin to a physics engine, if not a type of physics itself. But I do not believe the Firm "is to be" as you say. It is as we will it. The Firm is a social construct. It's boundaries, methods, and behaviors are socially constructed. They're defined, as Searle observes, by collective intentions. Collective will. If we will it otherwise, the Firm will be otherwise. As XKCD's Randall Munroe puts it, "we're the adults now, and that means we get to decide what that means." > The workers don't have the right or privilege of influencing what compromises are made. I don't put much stock in rights. There is power, and there is motive, but rights are pure poetry. Do the workers have the power to influence the firm? Do we have the motive? We certainly have the motive. The Firm shapes the conditions of our lives. The lighting. The furniture. The distance to the bathroom. The hours of the day. These are the material conditions of our sensable environment. They determine the quality of our life. The relationships we invest in, the food we eat, the financial resources we've available to furnish our habitats. These are all influenced by the firm. The air we breathe. The water we drink. The development of the landscape around us. These are impacted, immensely, undeniably, by decisions made in pursuit of the Firm's strategies. These developments affect us. So long as we are sensitive to our environments, we will have motive to influence the firm. Do we have the right? An immaterial question. Does a dog have a right to dig? Does a waterfall have a right to carve? Nonsense terms. Do we have, then, the power to implement our motives? To bring about our goals–unceasing, corporeal, visceral goals stemming from our animal needs, our bodies desires, to be fed, sheltered, exercised? You say we have only one power: to please the master. I would say we have another: to displease. It's nonsensical to say we have the power to "do well" without also conceding we have the power to "do ill". We have the power. We have the motive. Why talk of rights?

dmix 7y ago

Leaving while making it clear to your higher ups and coworkers that it's due to the dying work culture is not leaving without anything. Individual employees shouldn't have to make personal sacrifices, especially for a megacorp, beyond what they contribute each day as an employee. Unless they are an executive or management and get paid (and mandated) sufficiently to do culture stuff. There are people at Google who have this responsibility and are either failing, or possibly it's not really that bad and the news is overhyping a bunch of highly vocal individuals/small groups, while most Googlers are apolitical and happy with the group of people they work with. It's always hard to tell but most companies aren't getting multiple articles a year written about their culture.

wayoutthere 7y ago
> Leaving while making it clear to your higher ups and coworkers that it's due to the dying work culture is not leaving without anything. The company does not care about you. Your boss does not care about you. Managers learn to stop being emotionally invested in their employees because everyone is replaceable and everyone leaves. The company is fine with the dying work culture as long as the money keeps rolling in. Things will not get better from the efforts of employees below the Senior Vice President level. And probably not even then without that person spending all their political capital. I struggled with this at a job where I was systematically marginalized but tried to "change things from within". After I realized that nobody was going to help me and it was what was burning me out, I lawyered up and negotiated an exit. The only way to change the culture is to make having a shitty work culture expensive.
- dmix 7y ago
  I wouldn't take it that far nor so cynically. This extreme view of business is popular in dystopian fiction and with the pure customer service level interaction with some of the worst mega corps like telecoms companies but I don't think it reflects reality of most people's office workplaces.
  - montagg 7y ago
    This person is describing their own experience; what you're saying is that you haven't had that. Which is great for you, but it's not universal. Hopefully your experience is more common. But if this person's is, then the "dystopia" isn't that fictional.
    - dmix 7y ago
      You're also making a lot of assumptions about me but I'd rather not make this anecdotal. I would have probably agreed with OP when I was 18 after watching Fight Club a hundred times that was what modern business life was like. But I've had a large variety of jobs in my life from working outdoors, brutal factory floor jobs in an auto factory and a wood flooring plant, to office-space style boring corporate HQ jobs for a big brand, to tech companies for the last decade and it's hardly the standard. Especially once you get past lower level drudgery work. I already mentioned it'd be stupid to put that level of sacrifice into a company unless you were adequately compensated or given enough power/time to accomplish actual culture change. And of course there are modern bigcos who are borderline dystopian where it's impossible or SMBs with sociopath leadership who doesn't want change. Which is when you leave if you can't tolerate the environment, assuming you can, but attempting to change it is a whole different beast.
      - wayoutthere 7y ago
        I've also been a manager at a company with a shitty culture, and you simply can't stop your good employees from leaving for greener pastures. You're kind of happy for them when they do. I care about my employees and value them as human beings, but I also couldn't address their grievances or promise them any resolution to larger cultural issues. I knew they would leave, so I stopped being upset when they did and started taking the turnover as part of the job. It's not that managers don't care about their employees, they just don't care if or why you left because those circumstances are outside their control. HR collects that info in exit interviews, and a line manager has no influence with HR. If turnover starts hurting the company's bottom line, they'll do something about it. Otherwise it's not going to be a priority at the levels it needs to (how effective is your "Diversity Officer" in creating real diversity?)
corodra 7y ago
>Individual employees shouldn't have to make personal sacrifices, especially for a megacorp You'll never get enough credit for that line. To me, this is the biggest flaw with the computer science/programmer/IT community. They stand high and mighty against your average religious follower, of any faith. But in turn, they go to their knees and pray to the "tech gods". Both the billionaires behind them and the companies themselves. It's still religion if you think someone or something can do no wrong, in spite of what evidence shows. I remember these discussions of the potential abuse of power and economic might of today's large tech companies was in discussion in the mid 2000s. All of them were considered, tin foil hat conspiracy theorists and curmudgeons. I think "ok boomer" would have been said about them. I think Disney was the only real surprise. The rest, well, we were all warned. Hell, I only really started believing it in the early 2010s. But whatever, progress over people. We all must be civilized by technology, whether we like it or not. Those at Silicon Valley know best. We must always submit to the higher ups when it comes to our diets, lifestyles and where we live.

shizcakes 7y ago

I'm not convinced that burning out trying to change something that's unchangeable is the right strategic way to fix things for anyone other than the company. If enough people leave and go work on next-generation things because the previous-generation has run it's course - that strikes me as having many parallels in nature. Large companies don't adapt quickly unless they have a true (ie, in-practice, not just in-speech) mandate to do so. A leaf contributes to the health of the tree, but it doesn't control where new branches grow.

shadowgovt 7y ago
Googlers are trained not to think of themselves as leaves, but as roots. That's the source of the friction.

there_the_and 7y ago

The way we change things in this industry is by creating new companies and either outcompeting the incumbents or getting acquired by incumbents and taking them over. Trying to significantly change a company from the inside is a fool’s errand and these employees who keep trying are just reinforcing the incumbents’ positions.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
I don’t think this works. It reminds of the discussions about improving code vs rewriting. A lot of people think that improving existing code is not worth so they rewrite it. Often only to find out that the same problems come back just in different form. Same with new companies. If we just jump to the next company we will find out that they are basically all the same run by the same principles. Where do you want to from google? Any company will run into the same pressures as soon as it reaches that size.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  * Any company will run into the same pressures as soon as it reaches that size.* Then size is the problem.

jseliger 7y ago

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organizations/dp/0674276604 https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organiza.... A classic for a reason.

downerending 7y ago
Voicing your concerns might make you feel better, but voting with your feet and your dollars is the only thing that matters.

BurningFrog 7y ago

> I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one. This assumes the disagreeing people are right. In reality people genuinely like different things. If a disaffected minority tries to change what a majority likes, I'd expect they'll just ruin things for everybody. Finding (or founding) a company that acts according to your ideals to work for, while letting Googlers work they way they like, is the obvious solution to me.

CharlesColeman 7y ago

> I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one. “Moving on” is probably easier and pragmatic but as a society it’s better to change things instead of just tossing them aside and going to the next thing. I hope the same people will also be active in politics and try to change things. I agree. "Moving on" is a market/capitalist attitude, while "trying to change the company from within" is a democratic/civic attitude. The US has has way too much of the former and way too little of the latter than what I'd consider healthy for a democratic nation. Civic participation is often a thankless slog where it seems like your efforts are having no effect, but it's extremely necessary. Also I think "moving on" often isn't so much "tossing aside" but simply ignoring/avoiding the problem.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
I agree. You see the same mindset in politics where people fanatically stick to one party or the other but barely can formulate an own opinion on issues.
vzcx 7y ago
On the other hand, the United States was created by people who preferred the former. The tree root, branch, leaf, metaphor is nice. It could just be that institutions, whether economic or civic, go through a lifecycle, and that notions of 'progress' are just a cell's perception of advancements towards the next step of the cycle. Being a solid root or branch is no bad thing. But neither is being a seed. Not all seeds will sprout. Not all have too. Nature forces an economy of energy. Problems are 'solved' by mutants as they become adaptive in a certain ecology. This also implies a crowding out of the less adaptive. Go, and be a happy root. But do not despair over the happy leaves on the wind, nor the happy seedlings.

dnautics 7y ago

In a capitalist society, for small minority groups within large firms, changing from within is a strategically better. "Moving on" is only good if, as a baseline, you can line up a 'relatively equivalent' position, and if you want to enact change, there is enough momentum within the firm to do damage with 1) a mass exodus or 2) media attention. Both are made easier the higher up you are.

mensetmanusman 7y ago

This exactly describes the two major schools of thought in economics: -stay and fight to fix Vs. -vote with your feet and compete Each of these have positives and negatives :)

gukov 7y ago

Do you have similar thoughts on emigration (or brain drain) from less fortunate countries?

Ididntdothis 7y ago
Yes. In general it’s better to either stay or come back. Otherwise we are concentrating more and more into “good” countries and leave other countries behind. I understand it from an individual perspective but in the big picture I don’t think it’s a good thing. In the US it’s the same. Tech people and companies concentrate in a few centers. It’s probably better for companies and employees but not very good for the whole country.

ksec 7y ago

>I think the mindset of changing of something from within is actually a good one Yes except experience tells me unless you get your hands dirty and climb to the top of the ladder nothing will ever be changed. You may stop a company from doing things, ( Dragonfly or BlitzChung ) but their mindset wont change, their culture wont change. The attitude and culture of these companies will only change when people at the helm change, like Intel Bob Swan and AMD Lisa Su for example. And as with all things there is a long tail and slow death, Numbers on Balance Sheet and Report wont show immediate effect but over the years the trend will be undeniable. Normally by that time most of your talents are gone, you are left with people who are comfortable with current ways of things. ( Look at IBM ) Remember Companies is not a democracy, it is pretty much the other side of it more like Imperial ruling.

xj9 7y ago
there are democratic companies (called cooperatives) if you think workplace democracy is important, you should join one.

roenxi 7y ago

> changing of something from within is actually a good one. Politics; yes. Corporations; no. Corporations have specific legal, cultural and practical mechanisms to keep control with the shareholders and board. The major purpose of shareholders and boards is to be the people who decide whether a company changes or not. If shareholders and the board are happy taking on government work then Google will take on government work. Ditto military projects, ditto Chinese projects, ditto anything really. The workers don't have the right or privilege of influencing what compromises are made. The only influence they do have is to cause profits to go higher than people planned on; because that makes management happy.

rexpop 7y ago
> Politics; yes. Corporations; no. I have seen this fallacious notion expressed a thousand times over, in multiple disparate venues, and it exhausts me. I am even now questioning why I would bother to step into this conversation, and propose an alternative outlook. I do not expect you to enjoy my contesting statements. I do not expect you to thank me for them. Truly, at this point I expect negative votes, and some off-hand comments about how I am ignorant (despite the sources I can cite), or brainwashed (despite my personal experiences affirming the perspective). One thing I know is that "well actually"ing individually misguided forum comments isn't a sustainable method of educating Tech Workers like yourself–and please, don't bother denying that appellation. This is a forum for tech workers. That's what Hacker means, as it's used here. So, to the point: Politics are the mechanics of power. It's that simple. There are explicit politics in government, e.g. wherein the Constitution delineates literal powers of particular offices, and then there are the implicit politics of families, nations, firms, interpersonal relationships, administrators, etc. There is no sense in denying that the decisions we make in the systems we inhabit influence the balances of power between actors within them. When you pass me the salt at the thanksgiving table, you grant me a power to arbitrate the passing of salt. When I show up to work, I submit myself to the powerful authority of the Jira system, and the managerial strategy it comprises. These are political acts. > Corporations have specific legal, cultural and practical mechanisms to keep control with the shareholders and board. This is true. > The major purpose of shareholders and boards is to be the people who decide whether a company changes or not. > is to be This is weird. There is so much rhetorical work being done by this innocuous compound verb "is to be". In it, you imply a definitive truth. An inescapable logic. Something akin to a physics engine, if not a type of physics itself. But I do not believe the Firm "is to be" as you say. It is as we will it. The Firm is a social construct. It's boundaries, methods, and behaviors are socially constructed. They're defined, as Searle observes, by collective intentions. Collective will. If we will it otherwise, the Firm will be otherwise. As XKCD's Randall Munroe puts it, "we're the adults now, and that means we get to decide what that means." > The workers don't have the right or privilege of influencing what compromises are made. I don't put much stock in rights. There is power, and there is motive, but rights are pure poetry. Do the workers have the power to influence the firm? Do we have the motive? We certainly have the motive. The Firm shapes the conditions of our lives. The lighting. The furniture. The distance to the bathroom. The hours of the day. These are the material conditions of our sensable environment. They determine the quality of our life. The relationships we invest in, the food we eat, the financial resources we've available to furnish our habitats. These are all influenced by the firm. The air we breathe. The water we drink. The development of the landscape around us. These are impacted, immensely, undeniably, by decisions made in pursuit of the Firm's strategies. These developments affect us. So long as we are sensitive to our environments, we will have motive to influence the firm. Do we have the right? An immaterial question. Does a dog have a right to dig? Does a waterfall have a right to carve? Nonsense terms. Do we have, then, the power to implement our motives? To bring about our goals–unceasing, corporeal, visceral goals stemming from our animal needs, our bodies desires, to be fed, sheltered, exercised? You say we have only one power: to please the master. I would say we have another: to displease. It's nonsensical to say we have the power to "do well" without also conceding we have the power to "do ill". We have the power. We have the motive. Why talk of rights?